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Call For Grant Proposals In Perl Development
On Elpeleg writes "The Perl Foundation is giving out grants for Perl development ranging from $500 to $3,000 in February 2009. You neither need to have a large, complex, or lengthy project nor be a Perl master or guru. You are encouraged to submit a proposal if you have a good idea and the means and ability to accomplish your Perl project. The deadline for proposal submissions is January 31, 2009."
Your proposal must be submitted in the form of a self-aware regular expression with at least 200 backreferences.
I make over 120K a year programming in Perl.
1) Better tools... improve EPIC. Perl lacks a good IDE.
2) Get perl running on IIS using ISAPI (basically, mod_perl for IIS).
3) Either finish Perl6 or give up. Nobody cares about the CLR thing, give us Perl6 the language. The delay in shipping Perl6 is killing the language.
4) ????
5) Create a branch in CPAN called Ponies::*. There are many libraries for ponies such as Ponies::Little or Ponies::Fast.
You neither need to have a large, complex, or lengthy project nor be a Perl master or guru.
You do, however, have to be able to fit it all on one line.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
That means you're really going to be doing it for the honor. In that case forget the money and rather make a "hall of fame", something like: http://armlinux.simtec.co.uk/whoswho.html . That's worth more for a good consultant and costs almost nothing to give out as a prize.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Six figure salaries for a programmer is a sign of doom for the language. Nobody else is willing to do your job because the rest of the world has moved on. If only I could have my days as a $35/hr. VB 6.0 programmer back.
Some places DO seem to pay that kind of money. Or the GP lied. Or the really is good (the Perl world has some really smart and interesting people).
The real problem for Perl is the bad hype, which your tro... hrm, guessing without facts, is a typical example of.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Perl is not dead, Parrot is. Though I've heard it might in fact be just resting.
The delay in releasing Perl 6 ( shut up with the idiot mantra, "It'll be ready when it's ready" ) has done more to kill off the language than any other factor.
New scripters have taken up Python or Ruby. Old timers have got frustrated at the philosophical debate about what it means to 'release' a language. Some of the people involved with the project appear to be having a bit of a laugh at the expense of the coders who have been using the language. No goals, no milestones. Some airy fairy notion that it will never be complete. The PR job alone has been a total disaster.
It would have been better not to mention Perl 6 until it was ready - haven't you Perl people learnt the lesson about announcing the next product before it is ready for sale and while you still have the old product to shift?
If a stable version of Perl 6 is not released in 2009 then Perl will be left dead in the water. That may already have been the case for some time.
The primary reason for the longevity of the Perl 6 development effort is shortage of volunteers. To put it harshly, people like you spend their energy complaining instead of helping.
The money is most certainly well-spent on both Perl 5 and Perl 6. I was a Perl Foundation grant recipient to work on Perl::Critic, a static analysis tool and code quality aid. My contributions are making a positive influence to help with the readability, maintainability and portability of large Perl 5 codebases. (read TFA and you'll see my name mentioned) Perl::Critic is being actively used in improving the Parrot codebase.
What have you done to help?
> Stop writing Perl as PERL please, it hurts my eye.
The cyclops has spoken!
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
What is killing perl (at least at my job) is it's lack of a proper, modern, standards compliant webservices toolkit.
SOAP::Lite is a sorry mess. It's *simply amazing* that it works *at all*. I've tried to scratch that itch to fix it so many times, but the internals of SOAP::Lite are so *incredibly* convoluted, that it's damn near impossible.
Perl needs a completely new SOAP toolkit, with real WSDL support for all the different document modes.
That ONE thing will keep perl entrenched deep in the guts of the corporate world, in the end ... providing all of us perl hackers with job security for years to come.
So ... I've got a pretty steady day job, and no time at night. I already make 6 figgures, and I have a reasonable expectation of employment beyond 1 year.
Surely, there is one of us perlheads out there who is in a position to give a year up to really iron this out in perl. I'd donate even. Like I said, this would be the gift that keeps on giving to the perl community.
The Rakudo spectest chart has daily updates of exactly that.
how to invest, a novice's guide
Passing tests is something, but does not in itself equate to completeness.
Look at http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?development_dashboard that seems to have some goals. But still "Language Definition" is on the todo list. And "Language Definition" seems a pretty big item to me, as changes in that can change the tests. Not only that, would you write a bunch of code in a language knowing that at any moment it could be invalidated by a few small tweaks? I wouldn't, not production code at least.
They have some other things like the command line (deciding what it is, then implementing it), deciding what the installation package is, etc.. But still until the language design is frozen, you will never be done. And if a major change is made that results totally rebuilding the architecture you could end up throwing a lot of work away.
This todo list seems more like a brainstorm. Really what is needed is someone like Larry Wall to finish his documentation, then someone to write tests based on the Perl 6 language design (In Perl 6) and then passing those tests can become a chart to Perl 6. Although there will still be issues such as installation package, converting modules in CPAN and getting it working with Perl6, etc... But the most important thing is to get the language down. Then people will start playing with it to get a jump on learning Perl 6. And once the language is finalized it can start to be used in some corporate settings as a piece of beta software.
Most likely the real Perl 6 revolution won't come until CPAN (or some other entity like it) is made for Perl 6 and has some of the more useful modules (like DBI among others). Right now a large part of Perl's value is CPAN and the various modules available. That is another project that cannot even really fully start until after the language is finalized.
No one's suggesting you do so for Perl 6 right now. Ask again later this year.
Perl 5 is 14 years old, and its language design still isn't frozen. Almost every question of language design in the past year regarding Perl 6 has come from the implementors, whether people writing the language, people writing specification tests for the language, or writing applications in the language.
That's exactly what we're doing, just simultaneously.
If you're not advocating a waterfall-style approach I apologize -- but I get that impression. I've never seen that process work for any software, especially a programming language. I'm sure you can ask just about any other implementor of Perl 6 and receive the same answer.
how to invest, a novice's guide
Anyone?
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious